A POLICE trial of facial recognition cameras in just one street has led to the arrest of 100 suspects, including one wanted for kidnap.
The Sun joined officers as they made arrests as part of an £800,000 pilot scheme in Croydon, South London, where the Met force takes an on-the-run crook into custody every 34 minutes.
Facial recognition cameras have been fixed on lampposts for the first time to try to snare those attempting to swerve justice.
And we watched as police used the tech to pick out suspects from the packed high street, making more than a dozen arrests in just hours.
It took the total for the three-month pilot scheme to three figures.
Of those detained, a third were wanted for sexual assault or violence, such as strangulation, against women and girls.
Others detained included those being pursued for recall to prison, burglary and possession of offensive weapons, and the man wanted on suspicion of kidnap.
Supt Luke Dillon told The Sun: “We’ve learnt lots about how we operate this system, the number of arrests that we end up getting and we also start to get a feel for the people that we’re going to encounter and arrest.
“In the trial period, we’ve seen a 12 per cent reduction in total offences in this ward.”
Each deployment uses plain-clothed officers to find suspects when they are picked out by the cameras at each end of the high street.
Uniformed officers are then sent in to verify the suspect’s identity and make an arrest, before they are taken away in police vans.
Senior officers stress that the chances of a false positive are virtually zero and that it has only happened a handful of times out of the 200,000 people identified by the cameras.
But privacy campaigners have accused the Met and Home Office, which is funding the scheme, of overreach into innocent people’s lives.
Supt Dillon insisted: “We can’t look back at images of who walked past unless they are on that wanted watch list.”
He added there has been interest in the idea from other police forces across the country.
The new tech could replace moving recognition cameras which have to be on top of a van.
